Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 - August 3, 2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He returned to Russia in 1994. He was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist